Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day002.14
Last-Modified: 2000/07/20
MR RAMPTON: Except for the feeling that I am being boiled alive.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: That I have tried to do something about. The
air conditioning was supposed to be on. I do not know
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whether it actually was over the midday adjournment -- it
was. I just do not see that we can solve any of these problems.
MR RAMPTON: Perhaps the authorities at least might pretend
that it was mid summer instead of Siberia, we might be a
little bit more comfortable.
Cross-examined by MR RAMPTON, QC.
Q. Mr Irving, to be serious (and I am sorry to be a little
bit facetious) Mr Irving will need some files.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Yes, I think it is best to do that first
before you start.
MR RAMPTON: Yes, I agree. D2(i) and (ii), a copy of his
opening ----
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Would you prefer to have your own copies?
A. No, my Lord, they are not marked up.
MR RAMPTON: Those are the first two transcript files.
Eventually, but perhaps not now, and Mr Irving's own
writing, his books. Those are the two, just (i) and (ii)
are the only ones that are needed and a copy of the
opening to start with.
(To the witness): Mr Irving, there is an
elegiac story that you told us just now -- I do not mean
that sarcastically at all; it is perfectly true it is --
you blame that appalling note on the wreath on Deborah
Lipstadt's book, is that right?
A. I think I was quite careful to say that it is difficult to
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quantify and difficult to be precise, but one thing leads
to another which thereupon leads to another and in that
respect the book has created and generated a climate of
hatred.
Q. If what the book said about you is true, then it would
not, perhaps you would agree, be the book's fault but
yours, would it not?
A. I do not think any man can ever be expected to receive
a
wreath from hateful people like that and have it said
it
is his own fault.
Q. Let us take a step back in time (and I promise you, as
I have before, both publicly and privately, that I am
going on to Auschwitz this week, to give you time to
get
your head round it). In 1977, when the first edition
of
Hitler's War was published, you accepted the Holocaust
in
all its essential details in its ordinary sense, did
you
not, its generally understood sense?
A. Would you tell the court what you mean by the ----
Q. Yes, I will. The systematic mass murder of millions
of
Jews by the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
A. I do not accept the word "systematic", but for the
rest of
it, then that is an accurate precis.
Q. Including the continuous, if not systematic, though it
is
difficult to distinguish the two, perhaps, use of
homicidal gas chambers in institutions like Auschwitz?
A. Continuous?
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Q. Yes, over a period of time.
A. It is not a word that I used.
Q. No, not daily on a continuous basis, but for a long
period
of time, something like, I think, 22 months you
accepted
that Auschwitz used homicidal gas chambers to kill
very
large numbers of Jews, did you not?
A. I certainly did not say 22 months.
Q. No, let us try to get to the point. In your 1977
edition,
Auschwitz was characterized, I am not quoting, I am
paraphrasing, as one of the extermination camps, was
it
not?
A. That is correct.
Q. In the 1991 edition, it had become, am I not right,
merely
a slave labour camp?
A. That is correct -- well, I did not say "merely". I
said a
slave labour camp.
Q. "Merely" is my word.
A. You appreciate one has to be precise what I agree to.
Q. Yes.
A. Otherwise it will be used against me later on. You
said,
"It was merely a slave labour camp".
Q. You can be certain that I do not conduct litigation in
that way and that if I did his Lordship would sit on
me
quite hard. So have no fear of silly little Perry
Mason
traps like that.
A. I am very glad to hear it.
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Q. Until 1988 you accepted the Holocaust, however it be
precisely defined (and I am not quibbling about
minutia)
in its generally understood sense, that is to say, a
mass
killing of Jews by the Nazis during World War II, did
you
not?
A. I did not use the word "Holocaust" but I did quite
definitely accept that the Nazis engaged in mass
killing
of Jews during World War II.
Q. Do you accept that most people in the western world
now
and perhaps all over the world, I know not, when the
word
"Holocaust" is used mean the systematic mass murder of
millions of Jews by the Nazi regime?
A. I do not think that they ponder one moment to define
what
they are thinking about. They associate pictures with
words. When the word "Holocaust" is used, they are
thinking of people behind barbed ward, they are
thinking
of pits will bulldozers pushing bodies into them. It
is
visual images that are conjured up. They are not
using
legal definitions which can later on be bandied in a
libel
action. I think it is pictures that are conjured up
by
the word.
Q. No, we are not looking for legal definitions, Mr
Irving.
We are looking for -- I give you the card straightaway
so
that you can think about it while I ask you more
questions
-- what people would have understood you to mean when
later you denied the Holocaust, do you understand? Do
you
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remember my original question was it might be thought
eventually that the catastrophe or the misfortune you
described at the end of your evidence-in-chief had
been
brought on you by what you have said yourself. Do you
understand that? Do you understand, perhaps put it
this
way, that if you use a word ----
A. This is very similar to saying that the catastrophe
that
befell the Jewish people was brought on them by
themselves, and you can say to each of those
sentences,
each of those points, the answer is yes.
Q. I do not think ----
A. But between each of those alphas and omegas there are
very
many intervening stages which you are leaving out.
Q. That may be so. I do not think you are perhaps quite
answering my question.
A. I thought that was a very comprehensive one, sir.
Q. Let us go back to your opening yesterday. You made
noisy
complaint, if I may call it that, about being branded
a
"Holocaust denier", did you not?
A. Oh, yes, yes.
Q. You finished up by calling it a verbal Yellow Star?
A. Among my remarks I called it a verbal Yellow Star. I
did
not finish up by calling it that.
Q. No. "A poison to which there is virtually no
antedote,
less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed in
the
neck but deadly all the same. For the chosen victim,
it
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is like being called a wife beater or a paedophile.
It is
enough for the label to be attached for the attachee
to
find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from
normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star". What
did
you mean by "it"?
A. The phrase "Holocaust denier".
Q. Exactly. Now, then I would like you to look at some
of
the things that you have said publicly or, at any
rate,
semi-publicly. You have those two files there, the
ones
with the pink spines on them. Can we start, please,
with
the one which is, if I can find it, it is D2(i). Can
you
please turn to tab 9 which is the transcript of a
speech
you made at the Travelodge at the Airport Inn in
Calgary,
Alberta, on 29th September 1991. I myself quoted some
part of this, I think, yesterday in opening for the
Defendants. Can you please turn to page 4? If you
think
I am reading anything out of context, you must say so
because then I will go back and start again.
MR JUSTICE GRAY: So take your time if you need it, Mr
Irving.
A. My Lord, I read the whole of this speech in the small
hours of this morning in view of the fact that ----
MR RAMPTON: Then can I start, please, halfway down the
page,
five lines above the paragraph break?
MR JUSTICE GRAY: Sorry, I missed the page.
MR RAMPTON: Page 4, my Lord. There is a sentence which
begins
with the last word on the line "For", after the words
"in
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one or two dramatic points". Do you have it?
A. I have that.
Q. "For example, until 1988, I believed that there had
been,
until 1988, I believed that three had been something
like
a Holocaust. I believed that millions of people had
been
killed in factories of death. I believed in the gas
chamber. I believed in all the paraphernalia of the
modern Holocaust". Now, what was "all the
paraphernalia
of the modern Holocaust" that you believed in up to
1988?
A. The words that I had set out in the previous four
lines,
the factories of death.
Q. Yes.
A. The gas chambers.
Q. Yes?
A. Like everybody else in this room, I believed in them
up to
that point.
Q. Then comes this: "But 1988, when I came to Canada and
gave evidence in the trial of Ernst Zundel as an
historian, I met there people who knew differently and
could prove to me that the story was just a legend"?
A. "That that story was just a legend".
Q. Quite right, thank you, "that that story", that is to
say
the Holocaust story in which you previously believed,
"was
just a legend. I changed my mind I've now revised the
Hitler book so that all references to Auschwitz and
the
gas chamber and all the factories of death", so that
would
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include Sobibor, Treblinka ----
A. Mr Rampton, you have inserted some words there.
After,
where you read out "to prove that that story was just
a
legend", you then verbally inserted the words "in
other
words, the story of the Holocaust".
Q. Yes.
A. Or something like that, and that is not in there.
Q. Fair enough.
A. That story was referring to the paraphernalia.
Q. You corrected my reading quite rightly, I said "the
story", you said "that story". What does that mean in
that context?
A. The paraphernalia, the equipment, the factories of
death
and the gas chambers.
Q. Yes, and the killing of millions of people?
A. No.
Q. Really?
A. We have repeatedly made quite plain that the Nazis
killed
large numbers of people.
Q. "I believed millions of people had been killed in
factories of death".
A. You see, this is why you said "the story" instead of
"that
story". You were trying to sweep up the whole of that
sentence, including the millions of people, when it is
quite plain that I am talking about the latter part of
the
sentence which is the paraphernalia.
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Q. Mr Irving, we will get nowhere if we argue about
trivia of
that kind. What you had believed in ----
A. It is not trivia, Mr Rampton, with respect, because a
few
days down the line you will read back to me the
transcript
and say, "But you agreed on January 12th that this was
what you were referring to", and that is why I am
going to
be sticking on each one of these points, Mr Rampton.
Q. Let us get it straight. The story that you had
believed
in until 1988 was, amongst other things, that millions
of
people had been killed in factories of death by the
use of
gas chambers. I am paraphrasing the penultimate and
the
propenultimate lines of the previous ----
A. I am sorry, but that is not an accurate paraphrase.
You
just said, "I believed that millions of people had
been
killed in the gas chambers" and that is exactly what
that
sentence does not say. It says: "I believed that
millions of people had been killed in factories of
death.
I believed in the gas chamber". Can you not see the
difference between those two sentences?
Q. No, I am afraid I cannot. You tell me the difference.
A. I believed that millions of people have been killed.
Q. In factories of death?
A. In factories of death. I believed in the gas chambers.

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